She met Andreessen when her employer, a startup called Kiva Software, was bought by Netscape for $180 million in 1997. She joined up with him again at Opsware, which was bought by HP for $1.6 billion. Later she joined Aster Systems, bought by Teradata for $263 million last year. Along the way she dabbled in a bunch of other startups, as an advisor or investor.

She has three kids and was going to take some time off before plunging back to work, but the startup bug bit again last summer and off she went, along with two co-founders from Aster.

But what's it REALLY like to have that life? We asked Mulligan to tote a camera along for a couple of days and show us.

The big surprise: the stereotype of the working mom is far from true. Life as a startup CEO doesn't have to mean missing baseball games and family dinners.

During this particular week, she was speaking at UC Berkeley's DataEDGE conference, a gathering of top big data computer scientists.

7 a.m.: Sharmila waves goodbye to her kids. She often drives them to school but she's speaking at a conference today so has to leave early.

Business Insider

A day in the life of

8:39 a.m.: Sharmila gets briefed by Quentin Hardy, Deputy Tech Editor for the New York Times, who will moderate the morning panel at the DataEDGE conference.